At a high level, the numbers and the guidance sure seem to point to “Peak Facebook”. User growth is slowing because Facebook is running out of people who aren’t yet on the network – which is insane, but was always going to be true in the ultimate success state they’ve achieved. Meanwhile, those who aren’t yet on Facebook (and in many cases, aren’t yet on the internet in general), are unlikely to be nearly as profitable as the initial user bases have been. (The more profitable ones, like kids in the U.S., seem just as likely to be “Facebook Nevers”.) At the same time, Facebook is altering the product to make it generate less money – which sounds magnanimous, but is actually just necessary to keep people actually using the product and to stop fake news, etc. So it’s a perfect storm of factors that led to the Tower of Terror-style drop in the stock price.

Facebook’s saving grace – soon, perhaps literally – remains Instagram. And it’s no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg kicked off his comments talking about how great things were going over there. But the issue is still that the company doesn’t yet know if it can be as profitable as Facebook itself has been. And the answer is probably not, because we’ve seemingly crossed a chasm in terms of ad load users are willing to put up with. The feed was highly conducive to this, the Story format, less so. Still good, mind you. But not what Facebook has been used to.

So again, in a few ways it feels like we may have just seen Peak Facebook. I realize that’s dangerous to predict (and I do think the stock will bounce back, by the way). But as growth and monetization slow, Facebook has to start pouring more and more resources into what’s next. Instagram is the obvious answer, but again, only for so long. They need to figure out what’s next after what’s next.

Drinking: a Cold-Brew High Brew Salted Caramel Coffee. ☕️ I love these things (though I prefer more standard flavors), and it’s 9 in the morning on a Friday. So no 🍺… yet. Enjoy a sort of random smattering of links below. 🍻

The craft would travel at up to Mach 5, enabling it to cross the Atlantic Ocean in just two hours and the Pacific in three. (A merely supersonic aircraft flying between Mach 1 and Mach 2 would take an hour or two longer.)

The plane is fast, but it could have been even faster. “We settled on Mach 5 version,” says Kevin Bowcutt, Boeing’s senior technical fellow and chief scientist of hypersonics, noting that exceeding Mach 5, or about 3,800 mph, requires far more advanced engines and materials. Plus, it’s not worth it. “This aircraft would allow you to fly across the ocean and back in one day, which is all most people would want. So why go past those boundaries and complicate it? The world’s just not big enough to go much faster than Mach 5.”

Want. Immediately. And:

Though Boeing hasn’t decided the final dimensions, the airplane (which doesn’t have a name yet) would be larger than a business jet but smaller than a 737, Bowcutt says, so presumably seating between, say, 20 and 100 passengers. It would cruise at 95,000 feet, which is 30,000 feet higher than the supersonic Concorde flew, and a full 60,000 feet higher than the average airliner. That altitude maximizes the efficiency of the engines and keeps turbulence to a minimum, since the air density is so much lower that far up in the air.

The G-force feeling upon takeoff would last a full 12 minutes as the plane accelerated to cruising speed (on a conventional craft the feeling lasts just a few seconds) but the cruising-altitude experience should be serene, with stunning views featuring the earth’s curvature at the horizon and the blackness of space above. “Other than that you would also weigh a bit less,” Bowcutt says. “At that altitude you’ll be a few pounds lighter than on the ground.”

I’m 100% sold on this. I’m sure a trip would not be cheap, but if time really is money… Sadly, it sounds like this is 20-30 years away…

And not a moment too soon – but perhaps a moment too late? Either way, it’s silly that Apple keeps touting how well Siri is doing – how it’s the most used voice assistant, for example (which may be true in a weasel-speak kind of way, but come on…) – when it’s clearly not. If you want proof, look no further than how many fathers Siri has had just this year…

(Sidenote: what is up with Bloomberg not wanting people to link to their stuff?! Trying to share this link directs to a TOS violation. I have to manually bypass. Nuts! And very reader hostile.)

Imitation — or, more vulgarly, plagiarism — is seen as a form of flattery in Hollywood. One studio hears that another is making a movie, presumes it will be fairly popular, and rushes a thematically similar one through production, hoping to beat them to the theaters and steal a bit of the shine. But what makes something an idea worth stealing isn’t just the story—it’s the story’s place in the culture at that exact time.

Sometimes that’s simply an anniversary (like Steve Jobs’ death leading to both Jobs and Steve Jobs in 2013 and 2015, respectively), but often there’s more to it. And that’s what makes the duality of Gone with the Wind and Jezebel so interesting. Both are films about the antebellum South and the Civil War, which arrived in a marketplace that had never before rewarded those kinds of stories. Every Civil War movie before these two bombed at the box office. Before production of the two films, Irving Thalberg, a beloved movie producer, brushed off Gone with the Wind — now known to be one of the most profitable films in American history — saying, “No Civil War film ever made a nickel.” He was right: Until then, that was true.

So why did Gone with the Wind gross approximately $198 million domestically at the time (about $1.8 billion when adjusted for inflation)? And why did Jezebel, which is far less popular today, have absolutely no problem out-earning its incredibly expensive production costs? Because they were both released at exactly the right time.

Litcraft is not all fun and games, being peppered with educational tasks that aim to re-engage reluctant readers with the book it is based on. Lead researcher and head of Lancaster University’s English and creative writing department, Professor Sally Bushell, calls it “an educational model that connects the imaginative spatial experience of reading the text to an immersive experience in the game world”.

She says, of the Litcraft Treasure Island: “We hope it will motivate reluctant readers – we can say, ‘We’re going to read the book and then at one point, we’ll go play on the ship.’ I would have loved it as a kid. It is an empathetic task – you do what the characters did yourself, so you understand why they act they way they did in the book.”

The Treasure Island “level” has been extensively road-tested by children such as Dylan, whose school is set to adopt Litcraft in 2019. “It’s really fun,” he says. “I enjoyed it because I’ve read the book, but you have to follow rules in that. In games, you can explore. Now I know exactly what the book looked like.”

A very cool use of Minecraft. I would have loved this when I was a kid.

And, yes, our own form is also shaped by these rules. Our eyes, which let us see by collecting electromagnetic radiation, work according to the same principles that we use to build cameras: Lens and iris work together to focus and control the light. Evolution has sculpted our bones to a thickness that is just right to hold us fast against the ever-present gravity of the Earth, yet not so heavy as to weigh us down. Our upright posture, with limbs free to build tools and manipulate the world using the powerful computer in our skulls, is a hallmark of physics.

Aliens, if we ever meet them, are unlikely to be copies of us. Their multifarious organs and limbs—nothing in physics says that they must have two legs and two arms in the same places as us—may be arranged in different ways. But they, too, will bear the indelible imprint of the laws of physics, which work their way through everything in the universe, from a worm to a wormhole. Creatures akin to E.T. and Yoda are more likely than sentient blobs as our interplanetary neighbors.

One easy critique of science fiction (certainly in television and film) has been how most aliens seem awfully human-like. In the old days, that was obviously because humans had to play said aliens. But what if the laws of science do in fact dictate aliens be more human-like than not?

In a similar vein, our moon may have quite a bit to do with the existence (or at the very least, the continued existence) of life on our planet. And our moon – in particular, its size – seems more rare compared to the smaller satellites you typically see around a planet the size of Earth.

I mean, if the below is true, it may catapult Solo from decent but unnecessary to pretty interesting. Obviously, don’t watch the below video if you haven’t seen Solo yet and plan to as the entire thing is a spoiler. But the headline here is not (yet?) since it’s obviously just a theory. Albeit a compelling one…